Tag: Tiequan Zhang

That The Ultimate Fighter: China features the powerhouse *coaching* duo of Tiequan Zhang (currently riding a 3-fight losing streak with his sole UFC win coming over Jason Reinhardt) and Hailin Ao (retired) should say more about the talent level of its contestants than we ever could, but you guys have got to read this.

The premiere episode of TUF: China transpired last Saturday. While most of us here in the states failed to take notice of this, f4wonline‘s Mark Harris recently published a recap of the episode and offered some insight. You should check out the entire summary here, but the following paragraphs truly emphasize how fucked this season is going to be (emphasis mine):

The fighters on this season are a mixed bag of promising talent and hapless newbies…The quirkiest character this season is Li Jin Ying (0-0, welterweight), who admitted tohaving no MMA experiencebefore sparring in front of the cameras. His appearance on the show is so bizarre I have to wonder if he’s only on to illustrate to viewers the level of training and experience that’s needed to succeed in MMA.

Li is a spiritualist yoga instructor “eager to be Asia’s biggest MMA star”. Yes, a yoga instructor. He has a photogenic face, the kind of face UFC would probably want to put on advertisements in China, but he apparently has no MMA experience and describes himself as shy.

I never dreamed that there would come a day when TUF and American Idol adopted the same criteria for selecting contestants. I was wrong.

Our buddies over at Fightnomics continue to crank out the finest in UFC-related empirical data. They’ve given us a breakdown of everything from how fights end by division to submission success rates by technique, and now they’ve released a statistical compilation of every single significant strike thrown in UFC history. And in even better news, it appears that the average pace at which significant strikes are thrown has nearly tripled since the promotion’s inception, even with Jon Fitch’s seventeen fights taken into account:

Since 2007, UFC fighters average 6.8 significant strikes per minute (SSpM) of fight time. Again, this is not just while standing, but also from dominant clinch and ground positions. Significant strikes do damage, score knockdowns, set up submissions, or cause referees to jump in for the save. Significant strikes generally define the action in a fight, and as the analysis shows, fighter output by this metric has changed drastically since the early years of the UFC.

Through the 1990’s, UFC fighters attempted an average of only 2.8 significant strikes per minute. Averages for UFC fighters then more than doubled to 6.9 SSpM after the sport matured under Fertitta’s Zuffa umbrella. Modern UFC fighters also score more knockdowns and throw a slightly higher percentage of power strikes than the old guard, further suggesting greater endurance. In terms of accuracy, about 42% of these significant strikes land on target.

My main question, of course, is whether or not those girly leg kicks Carlos Condit used to outpoint Nick Diaz at UFC 143 were factored into these figures. If so, this graph is therefore invalidated by the gold standard for significant strike measurement: The Unified Rules of Stockton. Obvious trolling attempts aside, this data should at least hinder the notion that lay-n-pray is the fastest rising trend in MMA, despite that scared bitch Georges St. Pierre’s endless attempts to prove otherwise.

After the jump: Fightnomics breaks down the most active and least active strikers in the UFC. And somehow, Jon Fitch is nowhere to be found.

If I were to have told you before this event that a FUEL TV caliber card will have seven out of nine fights go the distance, it is doubtful that many of you would have watched UFC on FUEL 6. If I were to have reminded you that because the fights were live from Macau, China, you’d have to wake up at 9 a.m. ET to watch said card, I’m willing to bet we would have had a pretty vacant liveblog this morning. It isn’t often that a card with so many decisions is worth waking up early for, but UFC on FUEL 6 proved to be an exception.

Expectations weren’t exactly high for the evening’s main event, a middleweight contest between Rich Franklin and Cung Le. With neither fighter in the title picture – or even near it – and forty year old Cung Le bloodletting his foot just one week before the fight, this fight had a very high bust-potential. Most of us assumed that Ace would exit the cage with his first victory at middleweight since 2008, and that we wouldn’t be missing much if we started our afternoon nap a little early.

Instead, Cung Le gave us a Knockout of the Year candidate, countering a leg kick with a devastating right hand that secured the victory just 2:17 into the fight. Being the only knockout on the card, Le took home the $40k Knockout of the Night award, but even if every other fight ended in a knockout it’d be hard not to award such a brutal finish the honor. If you happened to miss it, here it is in all of its animated GIF glory:

After talking about it for two years, the UFC has finally moved forward with plans to hold their first event in China. Promotion officials announced earlier this week that UFC on FUEL 6 will be held November 10th in Macau, at the 15,000-seat Venetian Macau Resort Hotel’s CotaiArena. Said Mark Fischer, UFC managing director of Asia:

“This event is a major step in the development of the UFC brand in this region of the world and China in particular. We are delighted by this opportunity to build on the media growth and attention we have received and to finally bring a live event in prime time to the millions of fans in this area.”

No bouts have been announced for the fall event yet, although one big name has already offered to step up, and will obviously be shot down:

Want to make some real money this weekend? Then come over to my place on Saturday afternoon and be prepared to clean some toilets. Want to make some hypothetical, for-entertainment-purposes-only money this weekend? Then check out the latest UFC 136 betting lines (via BestFightOdds) and read our gambling advice after the jump.